Pretend (Season 8, Episode 21)
Premise: A boy’s death in a staged fight leads to a manipulative best friend and a grieving girlfriend who has been posing as a teenager for years.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 8, Episode 21
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Casey Novak (Diane Neal), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Misti Traya as Cassandra Sullivan, Michael Welch as Scott Heston, Barry Bostwick as Oliver Gates, Tina Fabrique as Jeannie Hayes, Ylfa Edelstein as Sonia Briglund
- Ripped from the headlines
- Loosely based on Treva Throneberry, an adult woman who spent years posing as a teenager, enrolling in high schools and foster care under false names, including Brianna Stewart.
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- Dawn DeNoon
Summary
“Pretend” begins when a salvage worker, Tim, goes back to a condemned building on Avenue A for his phone and finds a teenage boy in a leather mask bleeding to death in the basement amid barbed wire, thumbtacks and smashed light tubes; a severed femoral artery killed him. Neighbors point to Darren Tolson, a registered sex offender down the block, and Sonia Briglund, who has pursued Tolson since her son, Joey, disappeared the day after Tolson left prison, identifies the body as Joey. Before Tolson can be picked up, Scott Heston, 16, comes in with a video showing the dead boy, his best friend Riley Cuskey, in a staged “extreme fighting” match. Scott blames a masked friend named Jake, but the camera never moved during the fight, and he admits he was Riley’s opponent.
At trial, defense attorney Oliver Gates calls the death a consensual sporting accident, and a psychiatrist says the depressed Scott seeks pain to feel anything. The jury acquits Scott of murder and manslaughter and convicts him of criminally negligent homicide. Riley’s girlfriend, Cassandra Sullivan, a foster child, admits she slept with Scott once and that he had just learned in an anatomy class how fast a cut femoral artery kills. Double jeopardy bars a retrial, so Novak wants Cassandra to speak at sentencing; she agrees but never arrives, and after a tearful statement from Scott the judge gives him five years’ probation. Cassandra has been hit by a car. A traffic camera shows Scott’s friend Keith at the wheel of his father’s car, Keith says Scott paid him $500 to hurt her, and Scott is arrested.
Wiring Cassandra’s jaw, a doctor tells Benson that healed wisdom-tooth scars mean she must be in her mid to late 20s. The trail leads to a girl called Loretta Sheridan at a Pennsylvania high school five years earlier and to a Detroit shoplifting arrest 12 years ago that identifies her as Denise Pickering, now 28, who aged out of foster care at 18. She is removed from school and foster care. Gates then reports her for the statutory rape of Scott and insists Novak prosecute. Cassandra rejects a plea offer of probation, still claims to be 16 and represents herself.
Spoiler, the ending: Cross-examining Scott, Cassandra goads him until he shouts that he killed Riley because of her. Novak then brings in Jeannie Hayes, her first foster mother in Detroit, and Cassandra admits that after aging out at 18 she only wanted to be cared for again. Novak expects a plea, but men from high schools in Indiana, Maryland and New Jersey are now coming forward. Asked why she left them all, she says they grew older and she did not.
Why it stands out
- Showrunner Neal Baer said the writers were stunned to learn of sex offender Neil Havens Rodreick, caught disguised as a 12-year-old shortly after the episode was written.
- Misti Traya guest stars as Cassandra Sullivan, with Barry Bostwick as defense attorney Oliver Gates.